Lake Elsinore Unified will keep Butterfield

Butterfield Elementary School students, teachers and staff wave goodbye to buses and cars as they depart on the final day of classes in this June 2010 file photo. Although the school was to be sold as surplus property, Lake Elsinore Unified School District officials have decided to keep the site fo

Don Boomer

Butterfield Elementary School students, teachers and staff wave goodbye to buses and cars as they depart on the final day of classes in this June 2010 file photo. Although the school was to be sold as surplus property, Lake Elsinore Unified School District officials have decided to keep the site for potential future uses.

Butterfield Elementary School students, teachers and staff wave goodbye to buses and cars as they depart on the final day of classes in this June 2010 file photo. Although the school was to be sold as surplus property, Lake Elsinore Unified School District officials have decided to keep the site for potential future uses. (Don Boomer)

The abandoned Butterfield Elementary School may one day again be used by the Lake Elsinore Unified School District.

After agreeing to sell the property at one point, the governing board last week approved keeping the campus to one day possibly be used as a school again.

as a potential school to meet the futures needs of a district that may eventually support 35,000 students.

“We looked at the entire district and all the general use plans and all the specific plans and all the zoning plans and what we did was look at our community at build-out, when all the residential land is developed,” said Assistant Superintendent Greg Bowers.

The district, which now serves about 22,000 students at its 25 schools, is expected to eventually grow to 35,000 students.

Bowers said administrators then sought to determine how many schools would the district need to add.

The answer, he said, is four elementary schools, including the Butterfield property at 16275 Grade Ave. in Lake Elsinore near Lakeside High School.

Other future elementary schools are planned in the Alberhill, Summerly and Wasson Canyon communities. The district also likely will need one or two additional middle schools by the time the cities of Lake Elsinore and Wildomar are fully developed.

Until then, the district will allow Butterfield to sit vacant.

“We’ll probably wait for development and phase in a school to be in pace with future development,” Bowers said. “We don’t know which schools are going to go first, but we know we’ll need (elementary) schools in those four quadrants.”

That wasn’t the case on the west side of Lake Elsinore in June 2010 when the district closed the Butterfield campus to save about $800,000 annually in salaries and operational costs.

Originally opened in 1982, the 18.5-acre property was appraised at about $3.4 million when an advisory committee elected to sell the surplus property -- along with Jean Hayman Elementary School.

A number of potential buyers, including the county, had backed off their interest in the Butterfield site about the time school administrators began to look at the district's potential needs down the line.

One need they deduced is the district will eventually require an elementary school near Lakeside High School, and making use of Butterfield could be more feasible than having to buy another site altogether, Bowers said.

“We essentially had an asset that was costing us to maintain,” Bowers said. “Now that we look at the demographics and the build-out scenarios and the intra-district transfers, when we look at the big picture, we realized we’re going to need a site in that area. … As you start to put the financials together, we own a site and if we can’t sell it, why not keep it?”

Bowers said the district had not determined if Butterfield’s buildings would be usable or not. Some of the school’s portables are not valuable enough to be sold and will be designated for donation, according to a report to the board.